Review: The global identity crisis

Robert Jay Lifton has written some fine books that have examined trauma and the evil people can inflict on each other. The Protean Self is learned, personal, packed with references to poetry, painting and politics, but somehow rather disappointing.

Lifton argues that our sense of self is changing in response to social and technological changes, and named his book after the Greek sea god Proteus, who was able to alter his shape at will. We, too, are in flux and in fragments, aware in the post-Freudian world of the many bits of ourselves that go to make up the whole, or not so whole.

One difficulty with the book is that Lifton sometimes seems to suggest that a key difference between our advanced civilisation and that of Rene Descartes, David Hume and others is that they wrestled with ...

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